Please Spare Us Any More Climate-Change Alarmism

Back in the 1970s, many scientists fretted that a new ice age brought on by fossil fuel use would cause glaciers to expand, wreaking havoc.

A 1975 Newsweek cover story breathlessly reported that "the earth's climate seems to be cooling down." Meteorologists are "almost unanimous" that the trend will "reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century," and "the resulting famines could be catastrophic."

The CIA, NASA and National Academy of Sciences, Obama science adviser John Holdren and many "mainstream" news organizations issued similar alarms.

The Chicken Little ice age never arrived. Instead, we've been presented a new "consensus" view: that our planet now faces fossil-fuel-induced catastrophic global warming and a planetary biodiversity crisis.

The tales of doom remain standard media and political fare, even as the science continues to evolve — and ClimateGate and other revelations of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shenanigans and duplicity join the dissection of Michael Mann's hockey stick graph in reducing public anxiety.

New theories about solar cycles, cosmic rays and the dominant role of solar activity in determining Earth's climate are becoming ever more accepted.

Solar Heating

Nevertheless, Mann-made global warming, climate change and "weird" weather remain the foundation of political agendas for ending our "addiction" to oil, ushering in a new era of "eco-friendly" renewable energy, and "fundamentally transforming" our economy and society.

Their power, prestige, control and access to billions of dollars ($68 billion since 2008, to be precise, according to the Congressional Record) for biased research and crony-corporatist schemes super-glue environmentalists, five-alarm climate scientists and renewable energy companies to these disaster claims.

With fracking and other new petroleum discovery and extraction technologies proving we will not run out of oil or gas — and wind and solar power will not be competitive — anytime soon, climate change is really all they are left with. Those realities are driving an extreme policy agenda.

Because Congress rejected regressive climate legislation, the Obama Environmental Protection Agency issued thousands of pages of regulations designed to terminate coal-based electricity generation and impose a true-believer view that carbon dioxide must be drastically reduced to prevent a global warming Armageddon. Subsidized researchers are trying desperately to tie every conceivable phenomenon and event to global warming — even rape and murder!

By making fossil fuels scarcer and more expensive, while spending billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize wind, solar and biofuel energy, EPA's war on fossil fuels is forcing Americans to abandon the energy sources that power our economy. EPA wants to force Americans to switch to unreliable, impractical, expensive, job-killing energy sources that emit less CO2.

Back in the 1970s, many scientists fretted that a new ice age brought on by fossil fuel use would cause glaciers to expand, wreaking havoc.

A 1975 Newsweek cover story breathlessly reported that "the earth's climate seems to be cooling down." Meteorologists are "almost unanimous" that the trend will "reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century," and "the resulting famines could be catastrophic."

The CIA, NASA and National Academy of Sciences, Obama science adviser John Holdren and many "mainstream" news organizations issued similar alarms.

The Chicken Little ice age never arrived. Instead, we've been presented a new "consensus" view: that our planet now faces fossil-fuel-induced catastrophic global warming and a planetary biodiversity crisis.

The tales of doom remain standard media and political fare, even as the science continues to evolve — and ClimateGate and other revelations of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shenanigans and duplicity join the dissection of Michael Mann's hockey stick graph in reducing public anxiety.

New theories about solar cycles, cosmic rays and the dominant role of solar activity in determining Earth's climate are becoming ever more accepted.

Solar Heating

Nevertheless, Mann-made global warming, climate change and "weird" weather remain the foundation of political agendas for ending our "addiction" to oil, ushering in a new era of "eco-friendly" renewable energy, and "fundamentally transforming" our economy and society.

Their power, prestige, control and access to billions of dollars ($68 billion since 2008, to be precise, according to the Congressional Record) for biased research and crony-corporatist schemes super-glue environmentalists, five-alarm climate scientists and renewable energy companies to these disaster claims.

With fracking and other new petroleum discovery and extraction technologies proving we will not run out of oil or gas — and wind and solar power will not be competitive — anytime soon, climate change is really all they are left with. Those realities are driving an extreme policy agenda.

Because Congress rejected regressive climate legislation, the Obama Environmental Protection Agency issued thousands of pages of regulations designed to terminate coal-based electricity generation and impose a true-believer view that carbon dioxide must be drastically reduced to prevent a global warming Armageddon. Subsidized researchers are trying desperately to tie every conceivable phenomenon and event to global warming — even rape and murder!

By making fossil fuels scarcer and more expensive, while spending billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize wind, solar and biofuel energy, EPA's war on fossil fuels is forcing Americans to abandon the energy sources that power our economy. EPA wants to force Americans to switch to unreliable, impractical, expensive, job-killing energy sources that emit less CO2.

Even the University of California's Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project data are "consistent with the hypothesis that the sun causes climate change, especially in the Arctic, China and the U.S. BEST's data also clearly invalidate the hypothesis that carbon dioxide is the most important cause of observed temperature changes across the United States," they conclude.

The hysterical and spectacularly wrong predictions would be hysterically funny, except for one thing. They are being used to justify policies that are trashing our economy.

Congress and the Obama administration are already implementing draconian laws and regulations that make energy less reliable and affordable, destroy jobs, weaken our national security, make us more dependent on foreign energy supplies, raise consumer prices and slow America's economic growth.

Any future conflicts and refugees will result far less from future weather and climate events, than from ill-advised U.S., EU, U.N. and other policies that make energy, minerals, food, water, health care and economic opportunities out of reach for millions or even billions of people.

Our weather has hardly become any "weirder" than what Earth and humanity have faced countless times before. However, the "new normal" in political discourse, scientific research, democratic institutions, laws and regulations has definitely gotten both weirder and more pernicious.

Contrary to President Obama's intent, we don't need to "fundamentally transform" our energy, economy or society. We need to fundamentally transform the political system that diverts our attention and resources from real challenges, analyses and solutions.

 Driessen is senior policy adviser for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, and author or "Eco-Imperialism: Green Power — Black Death."

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